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Let's have another one about AI, this time about deepfakes. A picture of a somalian politician speaking in front of an upside down American flag was circulating on Twitter. Fortunately, we had a helpful journalist investigate, and debunk the image as a deepfake. The politician's staff helpfully provided the real image.
Only one problem. The original image circulating on Twitter was real. And the image provided by the politician herself was the fake.
As of right now, the politician's own Twitter is still linking to the now-retracted article, which used the deepfake that she herself provided.
I think the most shocking thing here is that a "journalist" had both the real and fake images in front of her, didn't even take the smallest steps to verify the authenticity of either image. Did she just assume that a politician wouldn't just ... lie ... and simply felt like the authority was enough to come to a conclusion? I think this forum already knows, but journalistic integrity has fallen so far that this laughably bad deepfake is just passed off as true because someone said so. Once deepfakes get more convincing (I had the latest nano banana try generating a similar deepfake and it was basically flawless), we're going to have to stop trusting the papers and our lying eyes too.
The other thing is that this is some seriously insane level of chutzpah here. Who is going to see a real image circulating around, then call the real image a deepfake, then provide their own deepfake as the supposed "real" image as "proof"? It's so farfetched that I'm surprised anyone would think this harebrained plot would work. Yet somehow it did and was regurgitated in other outlets including our favourite Axios.
This also shows that a politician can just pants on fire lie now with zero consequences. Not like trump level off the cuff stupid lies, but lie about what literally just happened at an event that dozens of people attended, with a multitude of official and unofficial videos and photos posted on multiple social media platforms, including the politician's own Facebook page. To point to a completely authentic image and just lie and call it fake. The gaslighting is off the charts. She can post "This never happened here's "proof"", while the video evidence is RIGHT THERE, posted on literally the same Facebook page, and people will eat it up.
In the comments sections and Twitter (stupid places I know) they are somehow still arguing that the evil nazis are somehow still the bad guys in this situation.
Anyways I suspect that once activists figure out on a wide scale what they can get away with on deepfakes with zero consequences, and how bad people are at noticing them, things are going to get really messy really fast.
(I don't want this to be about a left/right thing, I want to talk about ai and fact checking and whatever please)
The flag I don't care about, but the fact that they apparently chose to immediately lie at the drop of a hat and produce a deepfake as their response, is a pretty serious and telling flaw.
The most charitable interpretation I can think of was that some idiotic and incompetent staffer handled the situation. A more realistic (in my opinion) guess is that this is a kind of Jason Arday situation. That this woman is not that bright and used to just saying whatever is convenient without getting challenged on it or called out.
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I agree, though I think this is just the beginning. They got caught this time. Now the strategy is out in the open. I suspect that eventually the volume of deepfakes will get so large that it will eventually overwhelm our capacity to filter and verify information. A gish-gallop of slop.
I'm inclined to make a stupid analogy: the Tush Push. This is a play in football pioneered by Nick Sirianni when he was coaching the Indianapolis Colts. In it, the quarterback is physically shoved forward by one or two large linemen, in hopes of overpowering players in front of them. It's been criticized as stupid, brutish, and anti-football. It had been long-theorized but never executed successfully. Early attempts on the Colts had limited utility, ultimately failing to make much of an impact. Despite these failures, the failed attempts caught league attention, and everyone stood by waiting to see if this strategy became viable.
Then come the Philadelphia Eagles. With the team's specific player composition, body sizes, and overall acumen for the play, it became incredibly powerful. Success rates climbed over 90%, and suddenly the NFL had a completely new play-style on its hands. The Tush Push became the talk of the 2022 season. More notably, everyone tried copying it. They wanted a slice of the pie. To be specific, they waited for it to be successful before they co-opted it.
I think we're going to see something similar with AI in politics. We're in the early days, and politicians are still testing the waters. What will people trust? What can they get away with? I think Trump's incessant use of AI memes on Truth Social is a loud manifestation of this limit-testing, and this Somalli politician is another. At this point, most use of AI in politics has been a failure or at least an object of mockery. The models have only recently become competent enough to make convincing fakes for the non-boomer population. However, once limited success is seen I suspect that like with the adoption of the Tush Push, we're going to see an explosion of AI use.
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I am certainly cynical enough to believe someone would do this. I understand that most people aren't, but any serious journalist should be.
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You might not want this to be a left/right thing, but considering the political slant of most "fact checking" orgs, it will be.
“Fact checking” organizations are a lazy substitute for the lack of critical thinking in this country. Taking the rose tinted glasses off the eyes is incredibly difficult for most people. And this is especially evident when you ask someone to articulate the viewpoint of someone they are criticizing in a way they would find no fault with. The overwhelming majority of people can’t do it, but can only sneer, or satirize or caricature their opponent’s views. Tells you all you really need to know when forming a judgment about whether you’re wasting your time with someone or not.
has anyone ever had their mind changed by fact checking?
Fact-checking as in when one personally checks the facts and investigates a topic or "fact-checking®" where an institution Larps as the ministry of truth with a poorly-disguised political bias?
The former, yes, all the time.
The latter... mostly offers smug-confirmation for people who project authority onto institutions like the New York Times.
I think it started popping up because these institutions blurred the lines between their editorial and journalistic functions and the result was not the one they had hoped. They had hoped that people would start agreeing with the editorial content as if it was hardcore journalistic truth, but the result is that no one trusts anything in the paper, even journalistic content, unless they are already predisposed to agree with the editorial slant of the institution. With "fact checking" they are double for realsies signaling that it is journalistic work, but of course that does not preclude them from doing their usual manipulations: choice of subject, choice of accepted sources, caracterization of quotes or facts, and of course the subjective value given as a result when something is in the vast gulf between "absolute truth that isn't misleading, controversial or disputable" and "complete and utter fabulation with no supporting evidence of any kind".
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Yes. Catching Democrat politicians in lies and supporters parroting them even when obviously exposed has made me deeply cynical of the entire party. Also institutions propped by lies. Although it has not made me any less cynical of the Republican Party, who aren’t exactly honest either.
It hasn’t changed my core beliefs, but has changed how I see the world and believe they would best be accomplished. It hasn’t changed how I voted yet, but has changed how I speak and act.
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I would say "yes," in the sense that fact-checkers are part of the overall cultural milieu which sends a message to people about what they are supposed to believe.
But I think that's not what you are asking about. The real question is what happens in a specific situation when some partisan hears some really juicy news which puts his political enemies in a bad light, and then that news gets debunked by a "fact checker"
In that case if the partisan is on the Left, what I would expect to happen is that the partisan sees that this latest slander is "mostly true," feels basically vindicated; feels that to the extent the original report was incorrect it's a "fake but accurate" situation; the partisan's basic opinion about his political enemies remains unchanged, although he might not bring up that specific incident again.
On the other hand if the partisan is on the Right, what I would expect to happen is that the partisan sees that this latest slander is "false," doesn't put much credence in it because he believes the fact-checker has been captured by the Left; feels that to the extent the original report was incorrect it's a "fake but accurate" situation; the partisan's basic opinion about his political enemies remains unchanged, although he might not bring up that specific incident again.
So yeah, I don't think fact-checking does much in terms of changing peoples' minds.
It would be pretty great if there were a truly non-partisan fact-checking institution which was well-respected by everyone. But I think such a situation is basically impossible -- if such an institution started to develop it would be too juicy of a target to remain independent. Years ago, I had a fantasy about an AI system which could be programmed to be objective and non-partisan, but sadly it seems that our machines are inheriting our human foibles.
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I have. Most people? Probably not.
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I'd argue that such organizations fulfill a role in current society that is at least not insignificant for the powers that be.
Any ruling regime that has hegemonic control over public discourse has an evident interest in controlling and limiting the public dissemination of information because their control over society and its consensus depends on it. Its opponents and dissidents, on the other hand, are evidently interested in the opposite, and the simple social reality is that spreading and disseminating subversive and heretical information is always easier than suppressing and eradicating it. Hence the emergence of the centrist liberal narrative about the grave danger posed by 'fake news' and the corresponding need to enact 'fact-checking'. It also makes sense for the simple reason that mainstream liberal media has nothing to fear from 'fact-checkers' even if those were dissidents and heretics; after all, this media does not function by spreading lies and fabrications but by simply not reporting uncomfortable facts and by spinning information that is factually true according to their hegemonic ideology. In other words, there are no facts to check there.
The ultimate aim of 'fact-checking' is of course to eventually justify the cancellation, censorship and suppression of platforms accused of spreading 'fake news'.
Either you’re in the business of fact checking or you’re pushing a partisan bias when it comes to fact checking your political opponents. If the former is your goal, you’d have to shutdown practically all news outlets out there, as you’d be holding them to a information standard that’s as rigorous as censoring and penalizing people who make false medicinal claims about their quack new elixir that “they” don’t want you to know about; and spend the rest of your days reading only peer reviewed journals for the rest of your life. Not always the most objective either; but it’s among the best we’ve got.
Even “fact” driven people are often impelled by motivated reasoning. In most debates and political disagreements I’ve had with people, it’s become very clear to me that most of their counterpoints to you involve rhetorical jabs that take the form of asking you a particular question, solely for the purpose of thinking you aren’t able to answer it (e.g. they’re not seeking understanding or truth; but of course they expect you to take their POV seriously; always). Which is somewhat standard debate tactic: don’t ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. What I intensely hate are people who don’t directly laser in and address what it is you’ve said so what they’ll do is they’ll replace your argument with an argument you didn’t make; and they’ll attack that instead. And so you either have to interrupt them or let them burn the next 45 minutes answering a question they’ve asked themselves and then ask them the same question again while they can’t understand why you’re having to repeat yourself.
Occasionally I’ll get sent a video from a friend or relative of that Patrick Bet David dude from Valuetainment (who always struck me as a fraud and if you look into his background, he actually was quite the snake oil salesman) and one thing I’ve seen him occasionally pitch to people is he’ll ask them, “Are you a numbers guy?,” and then he’ll expect them to defend their views with evidence on that front he’s setup. That rhetorically worked pretty well for him until the day he had an economist on his show. And when said economist started rattling off numbers and concepts homie clearly couldn’t follow, he tried silently backing away from it and diverted to telling some personal anecdote “story,” in this soft, genteel tone and his head nodded somewhat down. One of those physical gestures that surely screams, “Oh shit… this guy knows what he’s talking about…” (Folds). A standard behavior of bullshitters and con artists. Needless to say, I too, often come prepared and am waiting for them when they come asking. The one redeeming trait I’ll give them is they don’t claim to be objective, they just happen to think the facts support their ideology. They’re no different than I am in that regard, at least to some degree.
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Maybe it shocked you, but I'm not surprised. Confirmation bias is the least of the sins I attribute to them, and it doesn't feel like deliberate deception on their part (especially since they retracted it).
If you throw in a couple sets of quotation marks and some attribution, then the retracted article even would've passed the "very rarely lies" test because everything past the third word in the article ("A deepfake video of Washington County chair candidate Nafisa Fai...") is correct.
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Well I think it is in the sense that it threatens to help polarize the United States even more than the present. If the leaders from each side are able to present credible evidence/argument to their supporters that (1) the other side is full of bad people who want to do them serious harm; and (2) any evidence contradicting the narrative is fake, it really has the potential to cause a lot of trouble.
Personally, as a conservative, if a photo came out showing Trump or some other Republican doing something very embarrassing I would be automatically skeptical of it and predisposed to believe evidence that the photo was faked, even if that evidence came from the politician at issue. That sort of bias is just heavily ingrained in human psychology.
That’s pretty much what happened here. The real image showed a Somali politician with the flag upside down, showing at best ignorance and at worst disrespect for the flag. Journalists who don’t want the immigrant community to be seen in either of those ways is strongly biased towards any way to “debunk” that idea.
And this is why deep fakes will work most of the time. They don’t have to even be good, they just have to conform to what people want to be true.
The most charitable interpretation was that the person simply wasn't paying attention. As a Trump supporter, if Trump appeared in front of an upside down flag, I would assume that he is old, distracted, and probably focused more on any attractive women in the area.
I think part of the issue here is that Somali-Americans are perceived by many as being completely hostile and disloyal to the United States, and appearing in front of an upside down flag confirms that perception on an emotional level.
I agree completely, and I would add that your typical journalist in the US probably has a very negative opinion about the sort of person who would spread these kind of images. Probably the journalist thinks such people are racist, stupid, etc. "Deplorable" is the right word. So yeah, it would be very easy to convince your typical journalist that the Deplorables are trading fake images to foment their own racism.
Combine that with (1) convenient mechanisms, e.g. Twitter, for distributing such things; and (2) the lack of a credible authority as to what is fake and what is real, then yeah I think your prediction is probably accurate.
In fact, I would guess it won't be long before it's easy to create AI-generated "reenactments" of culture-war sensitive events. For example the sexual encounter at issue in the recent Cornell fiasco. It seems that if it fits their tribal allegiance, people will even accept "fake but accurate" materials.
These things are extremely hard to predict, but I would guess that AI generated materials will lead to significantly more polarization in the United States, even more than we have now.
Somewhat relevant would be the Gabriel Paul Horcasitas case, where an AI video of the victim (Pelkey) was used.
I initially thought the video was in favor of lenience for Horcasitas, since it mentions forgiveness and the article talks about the sentence being tossed, but when I checked as I was making this post I realized I got it backwards: the video was created by Pelkey's family, who were pushing for the maximum possible punishment. The judge mentioned being moved by the video, and gave the maximum sentence. This was sufficient for the sentencing to be tossed on appeal, as the appeals court was not happy with AI influence. So not a problem in this particular case, since presumably resentencing will be uninfluenced by AI.
I'm curious if that position persists across time and situations: if a sympathetic-to-the-assailant family had made a video of the victim forgiving him and saying he shouldn't get a significant sentence and that somehow made it through the courtroom, would the sentence get overturned?
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I've seen two examples tweeted within the last week. I can't find one, but here's the other, when it came up on Reddit several months ago. The post photo is reportedly AI, though based on the real (probably? hopefully?) video linked by some of the commenters.
Neither example was of a drugged-up orgy, thankfully.
The Reddit comment to this effect, "its not misinformation, it happened - the "photo" is ai, the story is not.", is only slightly net upvoted, but IIRC it was even worse on Twitter.
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I'm confused by the whole thing. Is the flag upside down to signal some kind of danger from Trump? If yes, it seems weird to not own up to it.
Was it just incompetence on someone's part of how to fly a flag? Ok, I get wanting to hide that.
Was it sabotage from someone at the venue, and no one realized it was a problem in the moment?
From the description I thought she was standing in front of a completely spread open obviously upside down flag, which would have been quite the statement. This, I didn't even notice it was upside down since it's curled up? I see it now that I'm looking for it.
It seems much easier to believe everyone's just retarded with the hanging it wrong and then trying to cover it with a deepfake and then being too embarrassed to admit it.
An upside down flag was originally an emergency symbol; hanging it is basically ye olde equivalent of dialing 911. From that it acquired meaning as a protest symbol, meaning that the country is in dire distress.
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I mean, not noticing what direction a furled flag is in seems understandable.
The American flag, at least, is prominently blue on top with white stars when hung on a vertical pole like this. Flipping it would make the top section red-and-white striped, and look IMO completely wrong.
Depends how it’s furled- thé blue could easily be completely hidden.
Unless you attach the outer end to the pole, or use some unusually stiff cloth, it will partially unwrap like you see in the example here. But not impossible, I suppose.
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The odd thing is, it's not an outdoor flag thats attached daily to a permanently mounted pole; it's a ceremonal flag thats normally stored mounted to its pole amd brought to the ceremony where its placed in a pedastal stand. Flags on that type of pole are normally semi permanently attached to the flagpole. It's baffling to me how it ended up upside down in the first place short of someone wanting to send a message.
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If deliberate, disrespect to what many consider an important symbol of the country (and cause to doubt her loyalty). If accidental, a lack of attention to detail, knowledge, and/or care about what many consider an important symbol of the country (and cause to doubt her loyalty).
I'm inclined to think it has neither of the two above implications/interpretations, and was just a standard mistake by someone and not a big deal (how many FAITHFUL AND LOYAL politicians would have paid attention and noticed?). The fact that her campaign responded to the allegations by making a deepfake, however... well, it could have been a panic response, but it does shift my beliefs closer to "deliberate, showing a lack of respect/loyalty".
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Possibly a case of dual messaging?
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